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Unnecessary problems
- Crystalgate
- 11/13/2010 11:11 PM
- 700 views
Story:
You play as a group of four mercenaries working for a guild. During one mission they encounter a mage dabbling in dark magic. They report to the guild master who concludes that the darkness mage is a serious threat and that the quartet of mercenaries should go and find the Staff of Cyrenia to counter it. The staff is however split into multiple parts scattered around the country. That's more or less it. There does happen things in-between the parts collecting, but nothing less generic than the main story, at least as far as I played.
The characters are equally bare bone. We have the token main character, the token girl, a character who doesn't have enough character to even be a token something, and finally, the token jerk. After collecting three parts of the Staff of Cyrenia, I had witnessed a total of one scene with any sort of character development.
Gameplay:
The game mainly plays as a dungeon crawl. Go to a monster infected area and beat it. Then return to town and rest, resupply and check if the arms stores have updated their equipment selection. Hit a new dungeon and so on. Unfortunately, the gameplay is marred by problems.
Your first task is to just go to two NPCs and talk to them. That's quickly done, but those two NPCs just says generic stuff that you'd expect the standard RPG townsperson to say when you talk to them and are not in any other way distinguishable as the plot object. There is no ingame cue that you got the right NPC whatsoever. As a result, I thought I missed them and spent a lot of time trying to track down the right NPCs.
Shortly thereafter, I got stuck in a dungeon with no apparent way to proceed. It turned out that I was supposed to climb up a wine which looked more like a decoration than an intractable object. I found the solution solely due to out of desperation clicking on everything that wasn't floor or wall.
There's also a lot of recurring problems. The encounter rate is to high and said encounters aren't disabled in puzzle rooms. The encounters aren't fun either, fights boils down to spamming attack over and over. Skills that doesn't heal are nearly useless outside of boss battles due to the only characters with enough SP to use skill somewhat regularly are the ones who can heal. If the healers run out of SP, you have to retreat from the dungeon which slows you down, thereby defeating the purpose to use skills to speed up the battles.
The last straw was when I encountered a switch and teleport puzzle. The switches worked so that flipping them would remove some barriers, but also raise other barriers elsewhere. The barriers weren't color coded or anything like that, so you can't know which switch affects which barrier other than by trial and error. The only consistent rule was that the switches never affected a barrier in the same room they are in. This resulted in me going back and fourth between switches again and again while being interrupted by random encounters. So far the game hadn't really given me any reason to continue playing, so I called quit.
This is a pity since dungeons have a fairly good layout and the puzzles the game has are often good enough they would have been fun if it weren't for the interrupting random encounters.
Graphics and sound:
Dungeons are mapped to be functional rather than visually pleasing, but usually have enough decoration to not look boring. The music consists of rips that are rather good sounding. The rips doesn't always fit though, the title music for example, is ripped from a cinematic intro in another game that while sounding good, doesn't work so well with a static image. Still, the music is definitely above RTP music.
Overall:
As it is, The Staff of Cyrenia doesn't really give you any reason to play it. A lot of the problems, like the encounter rate and encounters in puzzle rooms, could have been quickly fixed. This game does work as long as the player can progress trough the dungeons in a good phase, but can't afford to have problems that slows the player down. Unfortunately, those problems exist.
You play as a group of four mercenaries working for a guild. During one mission they encounter a mage dabbling in dark magic. They report to the guild master who concludes that the darkness mage is a serious threat and that the quartet of mercenaries should go and find the Staff of Cyrenia to counter it. The staff is however split into multiple parts scattered around the country. That's more or less it. There does happen things in-between the parts collecting, but nothing less generic than the main story, at least as far as I played.
The characters are equally bare bone. We have the token main character, the token girl, a character who doesn't have enough character to even be a token something, and finally, the token jerk. After collecting three parts of the Staff of Cyrenia, I had witnessed a total of one scene with any sort of character development.
Gameplay:
The game mainly plays as a dungeon crawl. Go to a monster infected area and beat it. Then return to town and rest, resupply and check if the arms stores have updated their equipment selection. Hit a new dungeon and so on. Unfortunately, the gameplay is marred by problems.
Your first task is to just go to two NPCs and talk to them. That's quickly done, but those two NPCs just says generic stuff that you'd expect the standard RPG townsperson to say when you talk to them and are not in any other way distinguishable as the plot object. There is no ingame cue that you got the right NPC whatsoever. As a result, I thought I missed them and spent a lot of time trying to track down the right NPCs.
Shortly thereafter, I got stuck in a dungeon with no apparent way to proceed. It turned out that I was supposed to climb up a wine which looked more like a decoration than an intractable object. I found the solution solely due to out of desperation clicking on everything that wasn't floor or wall.
There's also a lot of recurring problems. The encounter rate is to high and said encounters aren't disabled in puzzle rooms. The encounters aren't fun either, fights boils down to spamming attack over and over. Skills that doesn't heal are nearly useless outside of boss battles due to the only characters with enough SP to use skill somewhat regularly are the ones who can heal. If the healers run out of SP, you have to retreat from the dungeon which slows you down, thereby defeating the purpose to use skills to speed up the battles.
The last straw was when I encountered a switch and teleport puzzle. The switches worked so that flipping them would remove some barriers, but also raise other barriers elsewhere. The barriers weren't color coded or anything like that, so you can't know which switch affects which barrier other than by trial and error. The only consistent rule was that the switches never affected a barrier in the same room they are in. This resulted in me going back and fourth between switches again and again while being interrupted by random encounters. So far the game hadn't really given me any reason to continue playing, so I called quit.
This is a pity since dungeons have a fairly good layout and the puzzles the game has are often good enough they would have been fun if it weren't for the interrupting random encounters.
Graphics and sound:
Dungeons are mapped to be functional rather than visually pleasing, but usually have enough decoration to not look boring. The music consists of rips that are rather good sounding. The rips doesn't always fit though, the title music for example, is ripped from a cinematic intro in another game that while sounding good, doesn't work so well with a static image. Still, the music is definitely above RTP music.
Overall:
As it is, The Staff of Cyrenia doesn't really give you any reason to play it. A lot of the problems, like the encounter rate and encounters in puzzle rooms, could have been quickly fixed. This game does work as long as the player can progress trough the dungeons in a good phase, but can't afford to have problems that slows the player down. Unfortunately, those problems exist.